


Rosemary

by Ladycat



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-13
Updated: 2014-02-13
Packaged: 2018-01-12 05:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1182677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladycat/pseuds/Ladycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What’s it like, having a mother?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rosemary

**Author's Note:**

> Set in season 1

Arthur is perhaps seven or eight years old when his father introduces him to a dark haired girl whose eyes are red and huge in her thin face. “This is the lady Morgana,” his father explains. “She will be staying with us.”

There was a lot of talk about wards and debts paid after that. It’s the kind of thing Arthur’s father loves to talk about and Arthur has learned to ignore it. All he needs to know is that Morgana is somehow acceptable whereas all the other children Arthur’s approached are not.

“Hello,” he says, smiling.

Morgana sniffles and gives him a baleful look. “My lord,” she says and tries to drop a curtsey. Her ankles wobble and Arthur has to grab at her lest she fall down. The hate in eyes – blue, he notes, but not at all like his, rich and dark like the sky never is – turns into purely scandalized ire and she yanks herself from his grasp. “I’m fine! Sire,” she says, whirling around with a flare of skirts, “I wish to see my rooms.”

Uther wears a look that will be indentified later as _manipulatively indulgent_. Arthur will see it a lot. “My son will show you,” he says and that’s permission enough.

Arthur takes her hand – can’t have her falling again, and she _is_ wobbling, he can see it – and hurries her out of the royal presence. He’s seen what it does to people who are otherwise quite nice and Morgana is different than the others. She’s _special_ , his father said. Arthur knows it’s meant an entirely different way, but still. He’s lonely and Morgana is at least interesting.

Especially when she yanks herself free with a haughty sniff, saying, “I’m fine, do stop trying to manhandle me,” before promptly falling into an ungainly heap on the flagstones. She also mispronounces ‘manhandle’.

“I’m sorry about your father,” Arthur says later, curled up in the second-best warm spot against the bread-hearth after generously offering Morgana the best. Cook, all the way across the busy kitchen, is very definitely not looking at them or otherwise checking up on them, even when she clucks over Morgana’s too-thin features and pushes more sweet breads at them. Surreptitiously. Arthur _loves_ cook. “It must be hard.”

“It is,” Morgana admits. Heat and food have lulled her into something like contentment and she offers him a small smile. “It’s strange, but I think I miss my mother more. She died a few years ago.”

“Oh.” Arthur thinks about this. “What’s it like, having a mother?”

“Well, you must know. You have one, after all.”

Arthur shakes his head and takes too big a bite. Crumbs fly everywhere. “No, I don’t. I have Cook, and a lot of the maids that watch over me. Is that like having a mother?” He thinks that’d be nice, having someone to smile at him and offer him cakes when no one looks because she’s his mum, not just a nice person.

Morgana’s mouth drops open, eyes wide in unbelievable horror. “Oh, that’s right,” she says. “Your mother died having you.”

There’s no accusation but he still bristles. “Well, it’s not like it was my fault!”

“Of course it was. She was birthing you!”

“I was a baby! How could that possibly make it my fault?”

“Well, if you can’t figure out the logic of it all,” Morgana starts, only to get smacked in the face with the dark, sort of dry heel of the treat Arthur’s been eating.

Instead of screaming or crying, Morgana narrows her eyes and throws a piece of bread with a very large nut right into Arthur’s eye.

 _Oh,_ Arthur thinks, _not_ on.

That evening, when Father is yelling at him with a great, booming voice and a look of such profound disappointment that Arthur wants to promise anything just so it’ll go away and never come back, Arthur tries to remember what they were fighting about in the first place. His father wants to know and Arthur really is trying.

It’s just that mostly he’s thinking that Morgana is utterly _brilliant_. And just a little bit scary, honestly, but Arthur isn’t afraid of anything, especially not a girl. He’s also thinking that he can’t wait to show her the stables and the forests tomorrow, because there are _sticks_ there and he bets she won’t like getting dirty, and if he tries to practice sword-work with her, she might do something even better than hit him back.

“Arthur, are you listening? You will treat her with the utmost respect,” his father orders.

Remembering her grin and rain-fall laughter when he beaned her directly in the mouth, Arthur says, “Yes, Father.”

* * *

Arthur knocks cautiously. He’s been not-yelled at quite a lot by Gaius and actually yelled at – although it sounds more like pleading – by Merlin to at least _try_ to be considerate around sick people.

“Come in,” a female voice sounds.

Damn. Arthur opens the door, already biting back a sigh when it reveals only one occupant lying in Merlin’s bed. “Sorry. I was looking for my idiot manservant.”

“That’s my idiot son you’re talking about,” Hunith says, smiling. “He’s gone to fetch me some water. Come, sit. He’ll be back soon.”

“Are you certain?” He is not nervous around sick people, he _isn’t_. “I don’t want to disturb you.”

“The only thing you’ll disturb is my boredom, so please. Come and sit, Arthur.”

There’s something about the way she says his name. It makes him flush, high and hot on his cheekbones, even as he sits down. The pallet beneath him is still warm. “You’re feeling better, obviously.”

“Oh, obviously is it?”

She utterly amused by him, even charmed, but Arthur feels him blush even harder. “He is devoted,” he says stiffly.

With a carelessness almost no other woman in Arthur’s life can match, she reaches out to pat his scalding cheek. “A mother holds a special place in her son’s heart. Never fear, though, Arthur. What’s left of it is all yours.”

“Yes, I. That is.” _Entirely inappropriate_ he wants to say. It’s sheer effrontery and probably dangerous and he’s bloody leaning into her touch. “That’s not what I was talking about.”

“No?” Hunith’s face is as broad and open as any peasant’s, completely different from the narrow fire of her son’s, but the intelligence in her eyes is familiar. “It should be, since it’s true. You do know that he’s utterly devoted to you?”

Arthur manages a shaky nod. Details of the last few days, like why Gaius looks sick or Merlin so haggard or how he himself got better, have been sketchy at best. But Arthur still knows. He _feels_ it, like the strength of the steed he rides, the balanced weight of the blade he wields. They are his: so is Merlin. They will do everything they can not to fail him.

So will Merlin.

“Yes,” Hunith says, soft with satisfaction, eyes flickering over his face like the he’s got letters written there, instead of features. “You do. Good.”

“I once – that is, I wonder if you might – ” He stops, blowing out a harsh breath. “It’s not often that I’m at a loss for things to say or a graceful way of managing it. You and your son have a disconcerting habit at encouraging _both_. It’s damnably annoying.”

“Oh, I know. It’s how I met his father. Being ‘insufferable’, as he called it.”

“That makes a rather depressing amount of sense.”

Hunith’s laugh is rough as the fingers that stroke his cheek a final time before dropping. His serious mood is reflected in ice-pale eyes. “Ask your question, Highness.”

“It’s not as Highness that I ask it.” It feels wrong to have her call him that. He blames that entirely on Merlin, who cannot stop calling him by his name, but so few people say it and _mean_ it. It’s good to hear it from her, even if it does make him flush.

“Then ask it, Arthur.”

He does nothing at all for a moment. Not even think. He just breathes with the slowness of someone used to controlling his body as if it controlled something more. He takes in this simple room with its messy nooks and crannies, the legacy of Merlin’s haphazard style of cleaning. Books lying everywhere, dust and faded ink combining with the sharp scent of the potions Gaius makes, the ones that Merlin is brewing now. He breathes all of it in, mind empty.

It’s the only way he knows how to ask.

“What’s it like, having a mother?”

He opens his eyes to find hers closed. There’s a tightness under her skin, echoed in the knot he bears within him. Has he crossed some line? He’s the Prince, of course, and supposedly there’s no line that he cannot cross, no consequences he has to fear. All of it he tells himself, and all of it he knows for a lie

It _matters_ what she thinks of him. It matters what he thinks of her.

“Oh, Arthur,” she says, soft again, like the faintest of morning breezes, or the way Morgana sometimes says his name, right before she hugs him over his protesting, or maybe sings to him, like she used to when they were young and it was dark and they both pretended not to be scared. “Oh, my dear boy. I wish I could give you an answer. I wish you had known your mother. It might’ve allowed you to know your father.”

“I know my father,” he says, but already he can see that’s a lie. Or at least only part of the truth. He knows that Uther Pendragon loves him, and that he would do anything for his son that did not also compromise his kingdom. But the man who stalks the already worn groove beneath the throne, who wears a crown of iron as well as gold, who looks at Arthur like he will never, ever be enough no matter what kind words he says, is not his father. 

That’s the king. And he is all Arthur’s ever known.

“A mother,” Hunith murmurs, “is the only woman in the world who may touch you like this.” Carefully, she reaches up to draw her fingers across his brow again and again, until he feels the touch within him somewhere deep, like a whispered song he sometimes hears when it’s late and he cannot sleep, and is too proud to call for Morgana. “She is not something special, really. Just a woman. She can be kind, or cruel, and sometimes both. What makes her special, Arthur, is that she is yours. Or wants to be. You may not have known your mother, but you have known what it feels like to have one.”

The door opens before he can ask how, two heads with tousled dark hair appearing before the rest of them. They look a pair, sometimes. Both pale with dark blue eyes, both tall and narrow, angular in their beauty. And at times they look at him with the same expression, like they’re exasperated beyond belief and it’s only their gritted teeth that keep them around.

Much like now.

“Are you bothering Merlin’s mother,” Morgana snaps, stepping forward so she can feel Hunith’s brow and card a stray hair away from her face. “Shame on you. And what are you doing up, anyway? You’re only just barely recovered and you’ve probably already started fighting with your knights again. You should be in bed, _resting_ until you’re well again. Lean forward, let me check – are you still fevered?”

“He better not be. I didn’t just – that is, you’ve only just gotten up, like Morgana said. If you start relapsing or worse, make my _mother_ do the same – ” 

Arthur feels deafened by all the fussing, buffeted by the winds of the two most annoying people in his life. He snaps back, of course, because he is _perfectly fine_ and he’s done nothing at all to Hunith.

Hunith, who is smiling at him as if to say _this is how I know._

“You are a horrible woman,” he tells her.

“Oh, hush, Merlin,” Hunith says while he squawks in outrage, “he doesn’t mean it, stop being the idiot he always calls you.” She glares her son into obedience – which is a trick Arthur is _desperate_ to learn – before turning back to Arthur. “Does that answer your question?”

“Yes,” he says, looking from Morgana to Gwen, hovering behind her as always, to Merlin who has taken his place by Arthur’s shoulder, casting anxious glances at them both. There are still dark circles under his eyes, an age Arthur wants to cast off him like shackles, and he thinks maybe he can do that, as he discreetly takes Merlin’s hand in his own. “Yes, I think I do. I should probably say thank you.”

“You already have,” she says, which makes no sense at all. He doesn’t ask for an explanation though. Just maybe leans back so his shoulder brushes Merlin’s stomach and thinks about nut-bread. 

He’s suddenly got a serious craving for some.


End file.
